Legal offices

Abstract

The paper aims to explicate what kind of entity legal offices are and what their specific mode of existence amounts to. That is, it aims to explicate in virtue of what legal offices can be said to exist. Also, it aims to explain in virtue of what these offices can be said to be legal. While the basic idea rests on an antirealist ontological position, according to which artifacts, and thus, per hypothesis, legal offices, depend on the human mind (i.e., they are mind-dependent entities) in the sense that the mental states of the authors of artifacts and the concepts on which these states are based are (at least partly) constitutive of their existence, the paper strives to show the relevance of the actual use of legal offices for their existence.